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Indiana Indiana - Indiana University Press

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indiana university press<br />

Beethoven in America<br />

Michael Broyles<br />

A pop-cultural tour of Beethoven’s America<br />

Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and<br />

coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop<br />

songs; he is Schroeder’s god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry’s freaked-out parent in “Roll<br />

over Beethoven.” In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as<br />

he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural<br />

icon. Broyles examines Beethoven’s appearance in a variety of contexts: American<br />

commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist<br />

critique of Romanticism. He considers portrayals of Beethoven in American film and<br />

theater and the uses of his music in film scores, as well as references to Beethoven<br />

and his music in disco, country, rock, and rap. In the end, he shows that to examine<br />

Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.<br />

Beethoven<br />

i n A m e r i c A<br />

M i c h a e l B r oyl e s<br />

Michael Broyles is Professor of Music at Florida State <strong>University</strong> and former Distinguished<br />

Professor of Music and Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State <strong>University</strong>. His most<br />

recent book (with Denise Von Glahn), Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP,<br />

2007), won the Irving Lowens Prize in 2007.<br />

“This book fills a great gap in our understanding<br />

both of Beethoven and of American culture.<br />

The panorama of this narrative encompasses<br />

antebellum rice plantations in South Carolina and<br />

the film studios of Hollywood, music critic John<br />

Dwight and rock star Chuck Berry, Theosophy<br />

and Black Power, Beethoven’s sketches, and<br />

YouTube videos.”<br />

—Christopher Reynolds,<br />

<strong>University</strong> of California, Davis<br />

Also of Interest<br />

Leo Ornstein<br />

Cloth 978-0-253-34894-4 $34.95s<br />

The Great American Symphony<br />

Cloth 978-0-253-35305-4 $24.95t<br />

November 2011<br />

Music, Popular Culture<br />

World<br />

376 pages, 61 b&w illus., 6 x 9<br />

Cloth 978-0-253-35704-5 $29.95t £19.99<br />

iupress.indiana.edu 3

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